Internet Marketing - Google Ratings Guidelines

SEOMoz modestly states "If you're looking for SEO 'secrets', you'll be disappointed by this post." Oh, we beg to differ. While it isn't exactly Earth-shattering or surprising, we found this list of 16 Google Ratings Guidelines to be worth passing along, just because it's obvious that many of you out there do not know them.

Take for example:

• Generic Queries Are Never Vital - So why are there so many web entrepreneurs out there fighting tooth and nail over domains like "beer.com" and "vacations.org"? Sorry to break this to you, but most of us expect to find a rather unhelpful domain at a generic.com address, and we're usually right.


• Copied Content Can Be Relevant - That's startling! We've had so much bad press about copied content drilled into our skulls that we're going to avoid it anyway.


• Ads Without Value Are Spam - Not news to you and I, but breaking headlines to a ton of landing pages out there. We're guessing they're all owned by people in third-world countries who haven't gotten the news.


• Google Raters Use Firefox - Yay! Not only our favorite browser, but our favorite add-on gets a plug too!

Strange Search Engine Ruling By United States Judge

In Nevada, USA, a judge has made an unusual ruling regarding search engines. To say the least.

See, Chanel (a fashion and beauty company) was in a fit because counterfeit websites are ripping off their good name. Fair enough. Then they had a court ruling to seize all of the domains (raising an eyebrow here, but possibly justified). But then the judge also ordered "all Internet search engines including, but not limited to, Google, Bing, and Yahoo, and all social media websites including, but not limited to, Facebook, Google+, and Twitter" to remove any index listings for the counterfeit pages.

Uh, your Honour? I'm sure your desk in Nevada doesn't have jurisdiction outside the USA, so what good will this do at all? You've heard of a little company called "Yandex"? It's kind of in Russia...

Is Google Getting Blamed More Than It Should?

It's hard to believe that we're still hearing about Panda. It seems as old as Y2K now. Yet here we are looking at another story about a webmaster sore at Google over it. Search Engine Watch gives us a refreshing reality check: Maybe a site drops in Google's SERPS just because its junk?

There's also, at the bottom of the article, a handy list of things to check when your site's rankings drop. It's good to keep in mind that sometimes webmasters throw themselves into a panic when they don't have to. We've seen web-workers at lunch with a laptop: They order lunch, hit F5, pay the cashier, hit F5, take a seat, hit F5, and they go "Whoa! We dropped three places!" and out the door they run while we watch their sandwich get cold, or until somebody eats it.

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Will Google+ Lead The Way For Erasing Anonymity On The Web?

Search Engine Land reports on Google's latest move in its attempt to horn into the social networking banquet, where they're going to start verifying an account identity. The chatter about this one is, surprisingly, more positive than you'd expect. While there are still concerns about privacy, it seems that web users are sick of something else even more:

Trolls, scams, spammers, sock-puppets, and general fools using the whole wide world for their personal playground.

It is true that the state of the web as we know it does lend itself to a hostile environment. Take the case of David Mabus, a Canadian who made a career out of sending thousands of threatening emails and IMs to everyone he saw on the web for more than ten years. He has just now been arrested. If you were on any side of an issue opposite him, chances are you were threatened under one of his many accounts.

Or take Sanford Wallace, the notorious "spam king" of Facebook, who's now in US authority custody and looking to serve about 40 years.

Can we really measure how much human misery these people cause? Making everybody online have to carry an ID badge may not be the perfect solution, but we just might be ready to sit back and give it a try.

How Google+ Could Change The Rules Of the SEO Game

In the film Minority Report, we see that advertising in the future is triggered by iris scanners who identify you by eye pattern and use that to have talking billboards address you by name. Our present is getting closer and closer to that science fiction scenario!

The latest musing on Google+ is over at SEOChat, which asks How Google Plus Could Change SEO. There's a list of features which Google+ adds, each of which have the handy side effect of offering more targeted advertising. Briefly, the list is:

1. circles - tracks influencers


2. +1 button - tells user's likes


3. sparks - shares interests


4. profile data - nothing new there


5. hangouts - group chats, could be targeted for more keyword focus


6. location data - get to know the potential customers in your area, anyone?


7. photos - soon to be crawled with facial recognition software

It's coming! We can almost hear the hologram billboards at the subway terminal: "Jon Anderton! You could use a Guinness right now!" Web Designers Perth

Have You Felt The Wrath Of The Panda Yet?

SEO bloggers were abuzz only a few months ago about the mighty Google update. Nicknamed "Panda", this was the update that was to limit the ranking of low-quality text-farm type sites that clog search results. The new update valid about June of 2011 is Panda 2.2, and Search Engine Roundtable has the dirt on that.

Now, they didn't specifically come out and say content farms... but it's pretty clear that they were looking in their direction.

This is actually good news for those of us who work to be both legitimate and high-quality. When we mean "content farms", we mean the typical empty keyword-stuffing filler content that most of us knew better than to keep using past 1998. All that and more is explained by Search Engine Land, which also goes on to mention 'scraper' sites that steal your content and repost it without even bothering to write their own!

Another kind of content is the "article spinner" variety. In this method, there's an attempt to make robots write like humans. You can spot spinner content a mile away, if you're a functional English speaker: "This is was good contents method and our are happy to provides it to you to use in or health." It's done by scraping content and then implementing an algorithm that changes one word for another. Nice try, guys, but - with a sigh of relief from those of us who write for a living - the tech's not there yet.

More recently, SEOBook also asked whether that update worked or not. You're still seeing some farmed content come up in SERPs, of course, but maybe not as much as there was a year ago.

Don't Panic - Whether You're Hitch-hiking the Galaxy or Optimizing a Website

We love posts like this that explore the human side of computer-human interactions. In Clients Who Panic – Tips on Calming Their Nerves, some deep Zen is offered to combat the nervous feeling that search engine spiders and other websites are plotting against you.

Because, they are, you know! While you sleep, other webmasters around the globe are spending the night whittling away at your PageRank... they wants it for themselves, the greedy hobbitses...

Those sudden drops in the rankings especially leave an acid pit in your stomach. But the fact is, Google keeps its algorithms secret, and as long as the process is closed, there's going to be some anxiety. Anyway, changing site rankings are just a fact of life in the SEO game. That's kind of also why it's such a fascinating business. Web Designers Perth

Internet Marketing - Are Good Guys Destined to Finish Last?

A very sobering blog post up at SearchEngineWatch, White Hats: This is Why You're Getting Beaten, about how the bad guys are mopping the floor with the good guys.

(and is anybody else getting tired of the hat metaphor?)

Anyway, as good a point as is made there, we'd like to ask, "Is it really that way?" Because here's the thing: attracting traffic to your website is all about converting sellers, via ads and point of sale. No matter what, that's the goal.

Now, no matter how many search engines you fool, the search engine isn't the one spending the money; a person is. And the person who gets to your site after you've rigged the search engine to come up as a false result in order to throw a page full of spam in their face is going to leave angry without spending any money and go someplace else anyway. So really, the ones doing blatant black hat SEO are actually just piddling away time and money anyway.

Kind of like spammers, there's always the few sites that will never go straight. But they're getting a lot of false hits and a few legit but very dumb users. Remember, all traffic is not created equal. We'd rather get 5,000 visits a month from the cream of the intellect market than 500,000 a month from bots and dopes.

If You Were Google's CEO For A Day...

A fun bit of engagement over at Matt Cutt's pad, asking What would you do if you were CEO of Google?. Cutts admits that he'd think in terms of big projects - starry eyed dreamer, and hey, nothing wrong with that. The comments also have a ball with this bit of day-dreaming.

But we're the boring old practical idealist. In Eric Schmidt's shoes, we'd either (a) put even more guns into Android than it has already, or (b) modify a Linux into a desktop OS and push it to compete head-to-head with Microsoft.

Seriously, we're tired of Microsoft owning the world with a small pocket for Apple and the rest is brave, tiny mites like Linux and BSD up against the Redmond Sauron. We'd just like to see somebody stand up to MS, just so we know its possible. Even if we still use Windows anyway, it would be nice knowing an alternative was ready.

Thinking Like a Google Engineer

How often we, in the web SEO business, chase down every rumor and scrap of information about search engine optimization, especially for Google. How seldom we get it straight from the horse's mouth. Ok so most SEO consultants will know him, but for those that don't - may we introduce Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO, a blog by a bona-fide Google engineer.

Chock-full of SEO wisdom, this candid blog should be mandatory reading for every budding web entrepreneur. A great example is the glossary section, with some down-and-dirty dirt on breaking a URL into its component parts, and busting some jargon on algorithms. And note, he doesn't burble on about meta-tag voodoo and link-exchange witchcraft, he just tells you what's going on!

Why can't all SEO experts be like this?